Yahoo using search trends to help reporters while bolstering its brand

Getting information directly out to people interested in your brand is completely a social media thing now, right? You post some links on Twitter or Facebook, and you’re done. Not so fast, says Jaime Le, director of consumer communications with Yahoo.

“Too often we hear traditional media versus social media,” she told a group at Ragan’s Employee Communications, PR and Social Media Summit at Microsoft’s headquarters last month.

What Yahoo does, she says, is to take a social media approach to developing stories with traditional media outlets by offering up the data Yahoo collects from user searches and providing expert sources who can make sense of that information.

“People are hungry for content,” Le said. “They love the fact that you not only have the content, but you have an expert that can talk about it intelligently, too.”

Gathering the data

Yahoo collects data from the millions of searches through its search engine, Le said, and by sifting through those searches, it can determine what topics interest the public.